Saturday, May 19

Getting Real About Pizza

If I was going to lose weight, I knew there was only one way to make it happen.

Gym, schmym. That wasn't the trick. Certainly not all of it.

I'd seen a documentary on public television that studied the effects of exercise and diet on weight loss. The documentary followed a group of people just as lumpy and sedentary and gormless as me who were training for the Boston Marathon. (Link here.)

Watch it. For me, the take-home message was this: Exercise doesn't make you skinny. You know what makes you skinny? Elbow Splints.

I'm tellin' ya. Elbow splints!
(And my talented niece,
graphic illustrator Rebekah Davis,
is fully on board. Thanks, sweetie!)
That's right. Splint your freakin' elbows. People with two broken elbows can't get fat. Neither can people wearing muzzles. If you want to get skinny, this documentary practically screamed, stop shoving pizza down your gullet.

One of the most astonishing phenomena created by the human race is people who can't get through the door. I completely understand eating yourself into a human volkswagon. It's easy. Just lift and chew, lift and chew.

No, the fascinating part is that other people are willing to enable this undertaking. Once you're too big to get through the door, you're too big to get to work. For most of human history, being too big to work was a self-extinguishing problem. You don't work, you don't eat. You don't eat, you stop being too big to work.

But somehow we've become a species that helps people who can't get off the couch get even larger than the couch. Who's providing the calories to people who are too large to stand upright? Who pays the credit card charges when the pizza man comes to the door? It's tragic. It oughta be a crime.

And it's easily fixed. Splint your elbows.

Yeah, that's right. I'm talkin' to ME. Future-bathtub-sized-momma-if-I-don't-stop-eating-pizza ME!

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